Thursday, April 8, 2010

Bad idea: Leap of Faith

Blizzard this week is releasing class changes in Cataclysm one by one. I didn't comment on shaman and warlock changes, because I don't have high level characters of those classes yet. But now the priest changes are out, and while I like a lot of them, the new level 85 spell for priests to me sounds like the worst idea ever:

Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or "Life Grip") is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can't seem to get out of the fire in time. Instant. 30-yard range. 45-second cooldown.

That spell is wrong is so many ways, I really don't understand why nobody at Blizzard considered the consequences.

The main problem with Leap of Faith is that the raid member who can't learn to get out of the fire in time now is able to point the finger at the healer and shout "I died because you didn't pull me out of the fire". /facepalm. As Gevlon already so correctly (if impolitely) remarked, Cataclysm is already putting more responsability on healers, and less on DPS classes. In a return to vanilla WoW philosophy, mana management will now be more important for healers, and raid boss fights will end when the healers run out of mana, not with an artificial enrage timer. I welcome that change, because it makes healing more interesting, but if I have to juggle healing, the new decursing, and mana management, I don't want to be responsible to pull slowpokes out of the fire.

In PvP Leap of Faith will open a whole different can of worms: Players absolutely *hate* to lose control of their characters in PvP. It is bad enough if the enemy death grips you, but now your own side will be able to move your character as well. In a PvP "raid" group, which formed automatically and over whose composition you don't have the slightest control, there are so many possibilities of players resenting even well-meant life grips. Not to mention the possibility that another player just life grips you to annoy you, or because *the priest* is being attacked and wants to force another player to help him.

I once jokingly said that I wanted to become Chief Social Engineer at Blizzard. I don't really want to work in the game industry, but new features like these show why Blizzard should have somebody considering the social consequences of game design changes. Giving more responsability for the success of a group or raid to the classes which already have more than their fair share of that responsability is not a good idea. It only leads to even more problems with groups and raids having tons of DPS and not being able to find enough healers and tanks.